'Firefly' Rewind - Episodes'

[Spooky]

http://www.hitfix.com/blogs/whats-alan-watching/posts/firefly-rewind-episode-1-serenity

'Firefly' Rewind - Episode 1: 'Serenity'
By sepinwall
Tuesday, Jun 8, 2010
Okay, as discussed previously, one of the shows we're going to be revisiting each week this summer is "Firefly," which Fox aired intermittently (and out of order, which we'll get to) in the fall of 2002. We'll be following the intended air order (i.e., the way the episodes are presented on the DVDs), which means we start out with a look back at the show's two-hour pilot episode, "Serenity," coming up just as soon as we vote on the whole murdering issue...

"Don't think it's a good spot, sir. She still has the advantage over us." -Zoe
"Everyone always does. That's what makes us special." -Mal

Joss Whedon series tend to grow in fits and starts. "Buffy" didn't really come into its own until the start of its second season, "Angel" not until the end of its second, "Dollhouse" not really until Fox canceled it and Whedon had the freedom of not worrying about that show's future. And Joss will cop to all of this without apology.

"Firefly," on the other hand? That was the show Joss understood from the start, even if Fox didn't.

Fox ordered "Firefly" based on the two-hour "Serenity" pilot, then panicked and elected not to run it first... or second... or fifth... or at all until they were basically done with the show and could throw it on the air the Friday before Christmas as a gift "for the fans."

To this day, the decision baffles me. It'd be one thing if Fox decided they didn't want to air a two-hour pilot, but you can always split those things up over two weeks. (That's how ABC aired the "Lost" pilot, even though that was designed to air as a two-hour event.) But "Serenity" does such a thorough job of introducing the world Whedon had created, and the small group of characters we'd follow through it, and how they related to one another - all while featuring plenty of action and suspense and humor - that it makes no sense not to lead off the series with it.

By opening instead with "The Train Job" - which we'll discuss next week, but which trades very much off the things we learned about these people in the pilot -  Fox more or less crippled the series before it started. And "Firefly" was not a show that could afford to come out of the gate hobbled. It's a sci-fi show, and sci-fi shows (particularly pure space operas like this one) have had a lousy track record on the networks in recent years. And it's a Western, which have had no kind of track record on the networks for decades and decades. "Firefly" was already debuting with a "Please Don't Watch" sign hung off the ship's port engine. While I doubt the show could have succeeded even if the episodes had all aired in order, starting out this way sent out danger signals even to the serious Whedonites.

Because the show ran out of sequence, it often came across as disjointed. By the time "Serenity" aired at the end of the show's network run, for instance, everybody knew that Simon and Book were good guys, so the attempt to make Simon appear sinister (black suit, black sunglasses) and to cast doubt about who the government mole on the ship was just feels like wasted time, as does the exposition about the Reavers and everything else.

Watch the series in order, though (and then watch the feature film that followed, also called "Serenity"), and you see that it came out of the gate fully-formed. The characters, the world, the style and tone were all presented in "Serenity" exactly as they'd be throughout the brief run, and with such confidence and heart that it improbably vaulted past "Buffy" and "Angel" to become the most beloved Whedon show (at least among most of the Joss fans I've encountered).

The opening scene in Serenity Valley not only prepares you for the way that Whedon is going to be mining all kinds of classic movie iconography for this series (it's a pretty pure last-stand sequence from war films of many eras), but sets us up with the fundamental idea behind Malcolm Reynolds (Nathan Fillion) and the series. Mal is a man who believed deeply in a cause, believed that others cared as much about it as he did, was betrayed to learn he was wrong, and now believes in no one and nuthin' but himself and his crew. He runs the good ship Serenity to stay away from the hated government he was rebelling against, and to create a very small world for himself where he has as much control as possible over protecting the lives of the people on board.

Fillion was previously best-known for a run on the sitcom "Two Guys and a Girl" (without the pizza place), and of course he's gone on to much bigger success playing the obnoxious hero on "Castle," and this role certainly calls on his dry, funny side at times. But it also calls on him to evoke a kind of Hollywood leading man machismo from a bygone era - a little bit Han Solo, but even more Steve McQueen. He's wonderful, and helps me buy into the sci-fi/Western mash-up more than I otherwise might have(*), and lends weight to the value of the other characters.

(*) Specifically, I never loved how literal most of the show's Western elements were. I get the idea that the border moons all have fewer resources and lamer technology than the Alliance-affiliated worlds, and that it therefore makes sense that we'd see horses and older guns and whatnot. But the idea that so many people five hundred years in the future would adopt the clothing and colloquialisms of 19th century America always struck me as a false note - like Joss wanted to be absolutely sure we understood that the show was a parable for the South of the Reconstruction era. I think he could have gotten the point across without putting Mal in a duster (though he does look good in it), showing us lots of prairie women in gingham dresses, etc.

I was lucky enough to see a very rough cut of this episode the summer before "Firefly" debuted, so I came into the show the way Whedon intended. And the moment I knew I was in with this show for good came during the climax, when Dobson is holding a gun on River, and Mal - frustrated from how things went with Patience and eager to get the ship off the ground before the Reavers show up - walks up, shoots him between the eyes, and keeps on moving like it's nuthin', because there just isn't time for negotiation or recrimination. That is the kind of man Malcolm Reynolds is, and the kind of world he has to live in, and it's dark and thrilling and kind of funny.

"Serenity" introduces us to all our major players (I'll have more to say about everybody else in the bullet points), as well as larger universe elements like the Alliance, the Reavers, Badger, companion culture, the mingling of Chinese and American culture, etc., and usually does it within the context of an exciting and/or comic set piece (like everyone bracing themselves for a possible Reaver attack, or the standoff in Badger's office). It's a pretty ai ya swell 90 minutes of entertainment.

So why, again, did Fox not want to show it first?

Anyway, some other thoughts:

There aren't a lot of completely functional couples in the Whedon-verse, but he gives us one here in Mal's loyal, badass sidekick Zoe (Gina Torres) and the ship's goofy pilot Wash (Alan Tudyk). Torres is great at the strong-but-silent thing, and Tudyk comes closest of all of the Whedon surrogate characters (Xander, Topher, etc.) of talking very much like his creator.

Along with the overtness of some of the Western stuff, the other element of the show I never totally loved was the idea of companions as revered figures in this new culture. I'm not saying that social mores couldn't have transformed that much over the course of 500 years that prostitution would become a respected, highly-cultured profession. But as the show itself admits, both with the behavior of Inara's first client and then with the ugly way Mal so often speaks of her job, sex-as-commodity isn't something that humans will just innately accept. There will still be plenty of jealousy and hang-ups and misplaced feelings, and I would think that would still be widespread enough to make the companion culture something that's tolerated or accepted, but not something that would make them be considered among society's elites. And yes, I know there is historical precedent for this, like the courtesans of the Renaissance. But enough people react to Inara in some variation of how Mal does that it always bugged me. And, for that matter, the sheer hostility Mal has for her job - even if much of it comes from jealousy - always got in the way of the Unresolved Sexual Tension between these two for me. Your mileage may vary.

There are a couple of little pop culture references in this one - Wash and Mal quote a few lines from The Beatles' "Cry Baby Cry," the Alliance ship is named after Dortmunder (the thief hero of Donald Westlake's comic caper novels), and Wash and Kaylee talk about doing a Crazy Ivan (which is an actual submarine maneuver, but was made widely-known by "The Hunt For Red October") - and when I asked Whedon about them at the press conference the summer before the show premiere, he actually looked a bit sheepish and said that wasn't something he wanted to do a lot of going forward. "Buffy" had been defined in part by all the references to Scooby-Doo and whatnot, and he wanted this world to be a cleaner break, and for any references to be more about homage than about characters namechecking old movies and songs.

Along those lines, Shepherd Book's line to Kaylee about wanting to walk the world for a while sounded very much like something out of David Carradine's "Kung Fu," and we see in the first showdown with Dobson that Book is a far more capable fighter than your average pastor. I loved "Barney Miller" as a kid, am always happy to see Ron Glass and enjoyed the unlikely flavor that he provided to this show.

Adam Baldwin had been wandering around Hollywood for 20 years before this show, finding steady but often unremarkable work because of his size and screen presence. The role of Jayne Cobb - stupid and ugly and untrustworthy, but also capable and funny and surprisingly loyal in spots (check out how he peeks in from outside the infirmary to make sure Kaylee's okay) - reinvented his career, turning him from That Big Guy Who Isn't Really A Baldwin Brother into a cult hero. I think it's fair to assume the "Chuck" writers had watched themselves an episode or 12 of "Firefly" before they began writing the role of John Casey for him. My favorite Jayne moment from the pilot: Mal reminds Jayne that he's just supposed to scare Dobson, and Jayne shrugs and says, "Pain is scary." The push-pull between those two characters will be an ongoing source of dramatic and comic tension throughout the series.

It's been a few years since I watched the show, and I had almost forgotten how ridiculously charming Jewel Staite was as Kaylee, whether she's delightedly eating a strawberry, reassuring Mal that her getting shot was nobody's fault, or contentedly patting her engines after the Crazy Ivan maneuver saves them from the Reavers. Question: how closely does Kaylee fit the definition of the Manic Pixie Dream Girl?

Along with Fillion and Baldwin, Summer Glau has probably generated the most fan love of any of the actors on this show, but she doesn't get to do a whole lot in the pilot, since River is in a box for the first half and coming in and out of sedation for the second. With Sean Maher's Simon, meanwhile, Whedon is trying to set up a kind of relationship between him and Mal like the one Jimmy Stewart's civilized lawyer had with John Wayne's unapologetic gunslinger in "The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance." And Maher (who was coming off two other short-lived Fox dramas in "Ryan Caulfield: Year One" and "The $treet") is okay in the role, but not really as capable of going toe-to-toe with Fillion as I think Whedon might have wanted.

Okay, so that's a lot on "Serenity," and I'm sure you will have many more things to discuss in the comments. The one thing I will ask is that we try to be respectful of the people who are coming to the series for the first time with these reviews. You can allude to developments that happen later in the series (or the movie), but don't get too specific or spoil anything big, okay?

Back next Tuesday with "The Train Job," and keeping in mind the spoiler thing, what did everybody else think?

[TinkTanker]

Excellent post! 

[Spooky]

I posted it at the OB as well. Lets see if Arlo remains a hypocrite and continues to not comment on any of my Firefly related posts, but continues to comment on my posts in the poli threads.

[TinkTanker]

I posted it at the OB as well. Lets see if Arlo remains a hypocrite and continues to not comment on any of my Firefly related posts, but continues to comment on my posts in the poli threads.

Tardo will probably not notice, but if he does, something along the lines of "Well, that's something!" and then that symbol that means "I'm a douchebag".

[Pearl@32]

"Don't spoil anything big."  He did give away that Dobson gets shot by Mal...

I like the assessment, but I'm not bugged at all by Mal's opinion of Inara's profession. It just means he likes her, come on!

And as for saying Sean couldn't go toe-to-toe with Nathan...I'm biased. I'd have to watch it again, but if it looks like he was "beneath" Nathan, I think the newness of Simon being on the ship worked in Sean's favor. Everybody kicked ass with acting on that show: one of the reasons why it was so perfect. They all brought the best out of each other.

[Pearl@32]

I posted it at the OB as well. Lets see if Arlo remains a hypocrite and continues to not comment on any of my Firefly related posts, but continues to comment on my posts in the poli threads.

Tardo will probably not notice, but if he does, something along the lines of "Well, that's something!" and then that symbol that means "I'm a douchebag".

:O)

[AdmiralDigby]

Tardo will probably not notice, but if he does, something along the lines of "Well, that's something!" and then that symbol that means "I'm a douchebag".

[Spooky]

'Firefly' Rewind - Episode 2: 'The Train Job'
By sepinwall
Tuesday, Jun 15, 2010
Once again, we're spending Tuesdays this summer revisiting episodes of Joss Whedon's "Firefly." (You can find last week's review here.) This week, it's time for "The Train Job," with spoilers coming up just as soon as my story has an odor to it...

"Time for some thrilling heroics." -Jayne

There's a school of thought in the TV business - and Joss Whedon says in the DVD commentary for this episode that he belongs to it - that after you make your pilot episode, you do variations on it five or six times in a row to get people used to your show, and to create an easier entry point for anyone who might have missed your premiere and checked in later. I'm not a fan of that philosophy, as it tends to lead to a bunch of really boring episodes that often scare away the people who were watching from the beginning before the show ever gets out of repetition mode and gets to the good stuff.

"The Train Job," though, is an unusual case of this. As discussed last week, Fox executives decided they didn't want to lead off with "Serenity," and they gave Whedon and Tim Minear a two-day weekend to write an entirely new script for an episode that could function as the series debut.

Hence, "The Train Job," in which every major character beat and piece of backstory has to be replayed or explained in exhausting detail.

So we open with Mal, Zoe and Jayne at a bar to again explain about the civil war with the Alliance, and to try to again establish the show's mix of Western, Eastern and sci-fi. We get another scene of Inara complaining that Mal enters her shuttle unannounced, as well as more awkward flirting between Kaylee and Simon. And we get exposition ladled on top of exposition ladled on top of exposition, so that viewers would understand why this outlaw ship is also home to a hooker, a preacher, a doctor and his crazy but brilliant sister. Etc.

And on top of all that, Whedon and Minear's script has to actually tell a story, as we see the crew of the Serenity tackle an old Western trope (the train heist) in a sci-fi manner (flying the ship overhead to steal the cargo).

It's kind of a no-win scenario. I had already seen most of "Serenity" before I watched this, and I know some of you first watched the series in the DVD order, so all the exposition and repetition sticks out like a sore thumb. And for those who came to "The Train Job" first back in the fall of '02, the backstory of, say, Simon and River isn't nearly as emotionally compelling as recounted by Shepherd Book as it was when we saw Simon take River out of the box in "Serenity."

Short of pretending "Serenity" didn't exist and starting from scratch - which may not have been a possibility (that pilot was a very expensive sunk cost that Fox intended to air at some point) - I don't know what else Whedon and Minear could have done. But the parts of "The Train Job" that are good - and there are a bunch of those parts - come whenever the episode gets away from having to make lemonade out of lemons and can just tell the story of Mal, Niska, Crow, Sheriff Bourne and a planet full of sick people.

Michael Fairman is marvelously creepy as Niska, playing him like a Jewish immigrant movie studio chief like Jack Warner, only if Warner were really a sadistic gangster. The introductory scene with Niska and Crow nicely establishes the jeopardy Mal is risking by going to work for the man, as well as the desperate state of the Serenity that he would find it necessary. Mal and Zoe's arrest creates some good conflict among the rest of the crew about who runs things when mom and dad are away (and lets Adam Baldwin do a great stoned pratfall as Jayne), and when the cargo turns out to be badly-needed medicine, we see that even our thief has some lines he won't cross.

That's all fun stuff, highlighted by the actual heist sequence, with Jayne and his silly earflap hat hanging down from the ship to grab the goods(*), and then by the hilarious, macabre punchline to Crow's threat to hunt down and kill Mal. In your run-of-the-mill TV adventure series, that threat is followed by our hero boasting that the bad guy is certainly welcome to try. On this show, in this world, with this man, it's followed instead by a good swift kick into Serenity's engine, followed immediately (and even more hilariously) by Mal making the same offer to the next goon, who understandably agrees to shut up and take the money back to Niska.

(*) It's so well-put-together that even chatterboxes Whedon and Minear essentially shut up during that portion of the commentary so they can just watch it. 

With the extra burden of having to explain a pilot nobody saw out of the way, later episodes will be able to spend more time on the missions, and on seeing the interactions deepen among the crew and passengers. Still, given the absurd limitations "The Train Job" had to work with, it's not a bad start.

Some other thoughts:

Shepherd Book seems to bear a particularly heavy load of the exposition, and I don't know whether that's because Ron Glass is a good talker, or because (as even he admits with the "I do feel awfully useless line) he's the character without an obvious plot function. (The crew members have their respective jobs, Simon patches up the wounded, Inara smooths over certain diplomatic issues, and River is leading the Alliance to chase Serenity.) But we do get yet another hint that Book wasn't always a preacher, as he's heard of Niska before and has some sense of how the man's mind works.
Whedon and Minear were also under pressure to make Mal and the show a bit more jovial than in "Serenity" (though Mal kicking Crow into the engine is just as dark in its comedy as Mal shooting Dobson in the face), and so there's even more Whedon-brand banter than before. Most of it's of the quality you'd expect from these guys, but I always cringe at Mal's "I'm thinking we'll rise again" joke right before Serenity rises (get it!) up from below the ridge. Too corny and on-the-nose.
On the other hand, Zoe's, "Sir, I think you have a problem with your brain being missing" is perfect in every way, from the word choice and order to Gina Torres' dry delivery of it.
"Two by two, hands of blue." So River not only know everything (like the make and model of Serenity), but has some kind of psychic abilities as well. Hmmm...
Up next: More fun and excitement with the Reavers in "Bushwhacked."

What did everybody else think?

http://www.hitfix.com/blogs/whats-alan-watching/posts/firefly-rewind-episode-2-the-train-job

[Pearl@32]

Firefly Rewind made the News blurbs on IMDb today!

[Spooky]

'Firefly' Rewind - Episode 3: 'Bushwhacked'

http://www.hitfix.com/blogs/whats-alan-watching/posts/firefly-rewind-episode-3-bushwhacked

By sepinwall
Tuesday, Jun 22, 2010

We're continuing our summer tour back through Joss Whedon's "Firefly" (at the end of this review I'll have links to the previous ones), this week with episode three, "Bushwhacked." A review coming up just as soon as I remind you of the story of the Good Samaritan...

"It's impressive what nothing can do to a man." -Jayne

"Firefly" is a Western in space, and few episodes combine the two elements as effectively, or disturbingly, as "Bushwhacked." It's essentially the "Firefly" version of those Western stories where the heroic cowboys come across the aftermath of an Indian massacre - with the Reavers standing in for the early pop culture conception of Native Americans as alien savages - but it's also about how the vast emptiness of space can dramatically, horribly change a person's personality.

Now, this latter point was also an element of Westerns themselves. In the 19th century, the wide open spaces west of the Mississippi brought the promise of new fortunes and reinventions, but there were often cowboy stories about men driven mad by the isolation and emptiness of the plains. Still, Tim Minear's script and direction make excellent use of the enormity and terror of outer space through Simon's fear of spacewalking. We're told that the Reavers were once men, and all sorts of things might have made them the way they are(*), but when Simon turns away from Serenity to look at what awaits him if he lets go of the handrail, it's pretty easy to imagine that view exploding the minds of some of the men looking at it.

(*) And I will remind you here, early on in the review, that we're trying to be friendly to people who are watching the series for the first time, and will therefore be vague at the absolute most about future stories about the Reavers, okay?

Doug Savant (in that fallow career period in between "Melrose Place" and "Desperate Housewives") was a good casting choice as the greenhorn Alliance commander, as his usual blandness quickly conveyed a man not used to life out on the frontier, where rules are less important than survival, and where the only rational response to a survivor-turned-Reaver is to snap the poor bastard's neck.(**)

(**) And we're now three-for-three on episodes that climax with Mal not messing around and choosing to quickly kill an opponent. Been a while since I went through the series, and I'm going to be curious to see how long the streak lasts, or if we get an episode soon where Mal doesn't add to his bodycount. (And remember the above note about spoilage here, as well.)

Minear also used the Savant character to fill in some of the backstory that was eliminated when Fox shelved the original pilot. The interrogations are in many ways even more baldly expositional than the eary scenes in "The Train Job," but interrogation scenes by design are expected to feature this kind of info-dump, and it goes down smoother here. It also offers good little comic showcases for characters like Wash (the immediate cut of him saying "her legs!" immediately after Zoe said her reasons for being with him were private) and Jayne (silently staring down the Alliance).

Minear also takes a different approach to reintroducing the Reavers than he and Whedon did with the rehashed material in "Train Job." (In fairness, he had more than a weekend to write his first draft.) Rather than try to recreate some version of Zoe's "and if we're very, very lucky, they'll do it in that order" speech, Minear finds a simpler, more effective bit of shorthand and shows us that Jayne is terrified of the Reavers. If the big muscle man is afraid of these guys, they're bad news, right?

For that matter, the only Reaver we actually see is the farmer who only turned into one as a coping mechanism from witnessing the slaughter of his friends and family. But that he's able to cause so much mayhem and destruction on his own suggests there's a much nastier danger out there on the edges than anything the Alliance can dish out. It's a place where Mal fits in much better than Doug Savant, but one where there are scarier things than even our man in the brown duster.

But getting back to that big black expanse of nothing for a second, it's interesting to see how differently the Tam siblings respond to it. Where Simon is terrified by it, River (given more of a showcase than the previous two episodes combined) absolutely delights at the sight, and wants to go out and do another spacewalk immediately after they go inside. Of course, from what we've seen so far of River, whatever the Alliance did to her has left her as cracked in her own way as the Reavers. Maybe the only sane response to the blackness is Simon's, where River's smile, while charming, is just another reminder of what's been done to her mind.

Some other thoughts:

    * This episode begins the show's Tarantino-esque obsession with Summer Glau's feet, which (commentary spoiler!) Joss will go on at length about in an audio track for an upcoming episode. Glau's a ballerina, so she's more used to expressing herself with her toes than some people are with their fingers, I guess.
    * One other pilot element slyly reintroduced: Jayne punks Simon by telling him to suit up on his way over to the other ship, when neither he nor the spacesuit are needed. It's not nearly as nasty as Mal telling Simon that Kaylee died, but if you look up "gullible" in a 26th century dictionary, you'd find a picture of Sean Maher.
    * In addition to the interrogation, Alan Tudyk gets some more comedy to play in the opening scene where Wash pretends to be horrified at the realization that nobody's driving the ship.
    * I like that Kaylee even finds an optimistic way to look at her attempt to defuse the booby-trap: "If I mess up, it's not like you'll be able to yell at me." She's tough, our little mechanic.

Coming up next week: "Shindig," in which the Mal/Inara sexual tension gets in the way of a job.

What did everybody else think?